I chose a task that came up at work today. I was asked to combine and compare various lists of fruit fly lines that we have either already used in experiments (“pilot”) or plan to use in the future (“total”). For others in the group, this would mean putting something together in MATLAB. I knew that I could do it more quickly at the linux console using cat, sort, uniq, and comm. I tried to explain it as I would to someone else in the group.